the diary of an advocate

Light in the Dark

Anthea Jay Kamalnath, 2003

I have been rediscovering the things that made me happy as a child, like civil rights causes, photography, and writing. These are old abstract photographs from 2003. Our New York home is an actual house of glass, a mix of mirrors and windows, with endless rainbows as lights breaks against the prisms. I have always been fascinated with light, so as a young amateur photographer I decided to get a magnifying lens for my Canon EOS and set up stands to prop up cellophane to make light bounce back between the mirrors and these 800 watt lights. Thank God my parents indulged this nonsense. I would shoot blind directly into the light not knowing what would come out. The result was these Rothko-like photographs with no digital alteration. Our professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge, Alan MacFarlane, wrote a book where he argued that the Renaissance happened in Florence – and not Venice! – because of the quality of glass. One object – just like one person – can change the course of history and thought.